Magic Reclaimed

by Coralie Moss

  Truth was, I didn’t know what the Apple Witch wanted with Cliff and Abi or where she could possibly be taking them. I was getting more and more concerned at the toll all the moving around might be taking on the elderly couple’s bodies, and I doubted Jessamyne was altruistic enough to bring them to their home to recover.

  * * *

  Jack walked me to my car. He made me promise I would keep him apprised of everything related to the Pearmains. Now that I was all the more aware of Magicals, my curiosity was piqued. I tried to picture what kind of wolf Jack shifted into. I almost asked, before deciding the whole segment of our conversation devoted to body odors had been enough revelation for one day.

  Once at home, I stripped the labels I’d affixed to the tea cups and saucers. Thatch left a note under the tea pot, letting me know he and Sallie were off on a “lumber acquisition” mission with Christoph and Wes. Returning everything to the cupboard generated a lot of noise, as my hands shook and the thumping coming from my heart echoed in my ears. I turned on the tap until the water ran cold then filled a glass and drank.

  A quick tour through the house showed the guys had made an effort to straighten furniture and fold and stack blankets and pillows. I decided to pack up my office while they were out shopping and move everything across the hall to my bedroom. While sorting, I could search for an empty notebook to use as a grimoire.

  Stepping into my office and closing the door enfolded me in a sensation of being safe. For a little over two years, it had been just me, Harper, and Thatcher living in this cozy A-frame. When I mentioned I lived in a three-bedroom house with two full bathrooms, people imagined a far more palatial property. But I—we—loved this house, and it represented so much more than a bunch of walls and a roof that gave us shelter and kept out the rain.

  Palms pressed to the wood at my back, I closed my eyes and coaxed my way into my house’s straight, smooth beams and bones. Followed along as neurons fired through the wiring we had updated when we moved in. Stroked its shingled skin, warmed by the sun and defended by a supple overlay of energy.

  My eyes flew open. I had never tried to describe my relationship with my house to anyone. Not even my sons. If the boys felt any of this, they had never mentioned it to me.

  “Where did she hide her things?” I asked, my voice a cajoling whisper. “Her magical things.”

  On the surface it seemed silly to ask a house if a former occupant had stashed any belongings in places not obviously visible.

  I took in a long, deep breath, let the oxygen expand my lungs, and softened my gaze so I could see the entire interior of the room. A response from my house could show up anywhere, though if I was waiting for something dramatic, like an object toppling from a shelf or sliding down a wall, I was likely not going to get it. The few framed watercolors and embroideries on the walls had been added after I moved in, the room had no closet, and the only shelf was the one I’d rigged underneath the desk.

  My eyelids started to twitch. I stopped with the attempt at becoming all-seeing and all-knowing and spoke the obvious.

  “Okay,” I said, “this isn’t working.”

  A chittering Kingfisher, hot on the tail of an interloper, swept past the open window at the end of the narrow room. I tracked his movements by following his urgent voice, up until the moment he collided with an upstairs window. A dull boom sent me running out of my office and into the yard.

  The brave, big-headed boy lay on the grass, stunned. I cupped his body in my palms before tucking him under a clump of scarlet bee balm.

  The Kingfisher must have hit one of the upper windows. I scanned the A-frame’s façade and smacked my forehead.

  Because, of course. A doll-sized trunk containing my mother’s things was stored in the attic, as was a shelf full of moldering books that were dated and dusty when I first played under the low eaves at age six.

  Chapter 12

  I grabbed a cleaning cloth out of the supply cupboard and ran to the second floor landing. Snagging the length of rope that dangled from the door panel laying flush with the ceiling, I gave a tug. The tiny bell on the end of the string tinkled, and as the stairs unfolded with rusty groans and squeaks, a lightbulb clicked on overhead.

  No one had been in the attic since my last visit, if the undisturbed drag marks told the truth. I bent at the waist to avoid hitting my head on the cross beams and activated my phone’s flashlight when I got close enough to read the book titles.

  A handful looked old enough to have been printed and bound two or three generations ago, and most looked to be volumes dedicated to creating the model housekeeper.

  I hooked my finger over a spine marked Winter Celebrations and rested the book on my lap. A swipe of the flannel rag revealed an embossed illustration of holly leaves and berries centered on the book’s cover, with faint touches of gold visible in the title’s lettering. Inside were chapters devoted to every aspect of winter rituals from the Solstice onward, all of them based on the witch’s calendar.

  I’m not sure why I was surprised. I knew so little about either side of my family. Maybe it shouldn’t have felt newsworthy to discover I had been born into a line of magic practitioners. Inside the book’s front cover was a name and a date, but the ink was too faded to decipher and my sensitivity to dust was beginning to irritate the insides of my nostrils.

  I swept the flashlight across the rest of the books. The ones that caught my eye were two more with Good Housesweeping in the title and three more volumes dedicated to the seasons. I made a stack and grunted my way to the opening in the floor. The books were heavy. Keeping my butt on the slatted ladder steps, I got them all down and to my office in one trip.

  My legs went wobbly enough I had to plunk clumsily onto the only chair, and as I perused my haul, the skin on my arms tingled. I leaned forward, ducked my head under my desk, and pulled out the three volumes of Good Housesweeping I’d scarfed from the attic on a prior search.

  Arrayed on the floor in front of me, front covers facing up, were five volumes of witchy wisdom from the fifties, sixties, and seventies and the four much older tomes of Magical knowledge.

  I pushed the chair aside, sat cross-legged on the floor, and went through the bound books one at a time. Each had the same faint inscription on the inside page and chapter after chapter of rituals, recipes, songs, and spells. Taking the Winter volume into my lap, I scanned the chapter headings and found recipes for seed bread and suggestions for which seeds were most appropriate to use for Imbolc’s Seeds of Dreams planting ritual, to take place on February first.

  Closing the cover, I hugged the book to my chest. This was what I had been missing for most of my life. Ritual. I felt the longing when I was in the forest with the circle of witches at my ritual of initiation, and I felt it now.

  The next marker on my life’s new calendar, wheel-shaped and ruled by the cycles of the moon, was the autumn equinox on September twenty-first. I vowed to honor the change of seasons, whether I was a member of a coven by then or not.

  A quick perusal of the three other volumes convinced me their contents were as advertised on their spines and none was doing double-duty as my mother’s grimoire. I stacked the four on the shelf under my desk and turned to appraise my collection of Good Housesweeping.

  I rocked forward onto my hands and knees, lifted the front covers, and thumbed the lower corners. The pages fanned apart without any loose bits of paper dislodging themselves and delivering me secret messages.

  On closer inspection, it was clear there was nothing more within the heavy covers than recipes and tips on being a more effective and complete marital partner and homemaker.

  How positively nineteenth century.

  Sitting back on my heels, I tried another approach. Lifting the left-most volume, I ran my thumb down and up its spine. The heavier, treated paper crinkled with age but didn’t crack or split. I brought the book to my nose and sniffed. Any hope of scenting my mother or the house in Maine was long gone. These just smelled like pages and pages
of old paper that had spent most of their years expanding with damp in the winter and drying to a crisp in the summer.

  Each bound section was divided by heavy paper stock. Tabs labelled the content of each. And at the back of each section were three pages with “Notes” printed at the top. I flipped through all five volumes.

  One was blank, and within all the others, someone—my mother, perhaps, or my aunt or maybe their mother—had added handwritten recipes. At least, they looked like recipes. The writing was tiny, though the lines were straight, and the lists of ingredients, accompanied by abbreviations like c and tsp, were indented.

  I slid the earpieces of my reading glasses behind my ears, positioned the first book just so, and gasped.

  Because when the back cover faced up in the strong light of a summer’s afternoon, this innocuous collection of outdated essays revealed another persona. Underneath the commercially produced cover was a different cover, one with swirls of silver leaf and other embellishments. I could see all that under the veil of the paper cover, and I couldn’t tell if it was something I could reveal simply by peeling that layer back—which I could do—or if I would need to use a magical touch or incantation—which I would need help with.

  I opted to try my athame. The blade, which I was supposed to use for witchy rituals, had a very dull edge and spent most of its time on my bureau.

  Athame in hand, I paused at the threshold to my office. Sun streamed through my open window, giving the full weight of its attention to the section of the floor covered with books. The pesky dust motes that followed me down from the attic converted to sparkly bits of pink, orange, and yellow glitter in the light.

  I giggled a bit at the presentation, squatted near the first victim, and sliced a thin line all around the edge of the rectangular cover. As I cut, the paper curled off the under-layer, and when the tip of my knife sliced the last bit of paper, the raggedy cover turned to translucent ash. Marveling at the true cover, I set my thumb pad to one corner and lifted.

  Centered on a book plate affixed in the middle of the frontispiece, written in cursive by a steady hand, was Genevieve V. du Sang Volume III.

  Mama. Memories of swimming in the ocean with my mother washed over me, turning my body liquid and forcing my eyes to water. A memory from my nap in the burial mound added itself to the eddy of emotions, and before I knew it I was awash in my mother’s presence.

  I hadn’t asked for Christoph’s—and by extension, my father’s—last name. But now I had my mother’s.

  I pressed an open hand to my heart. Acquiring yet another detail about my parentage was no small thing. I delved further, resting my fingertips on the cover’s ruby-colored leather, hoping to sense a shift or reaction.

  Swirling lines of silver gilt depicted trees, leaves, flowers, birds, animals, and arcane symbols. I pivoted on my knee and dragged the flower press and sketchbook from under my desk. Opening to a page with side-by-side drawings of stalks of wild lupins, I compared what I knew were my mother’s illustrations with those on the book cover.

  The hand was the same.

  Then and there, I wanted to cut off every other back cover and peel away what was hiding an important piece of my history, my mother’s history. Before I did though, I lifted the cover again, shoved my reading glasses on my face, and rifled the pages. My athame buzzed in anticipation. I touched its tip to the top page.

  Nothing.

  I peered at the edges again. With the help of a magnifying glass, the paper looked thick enough to split, like layers of phyllo dough just beginning to dry out. I teased in the tip of my blade and coaxed it back and forth until I’d opened a six-inch section. I blew into the space.

  Nothing.

  Closing my eyes, I searched through the floor to the root cellar, to the soil directly under the house, all the way to the edges of the property. I pulled everything I could toward me, toward my desire to know my mother, my desire to know my history and enrich my future, my sons’ futures. I squeezed my eyelids shut, inhaled, and blew again, through pursed lips, softly exhaling multi-stranded threads of hope, desire, and curiosity into the small opening.

  The top, bottom, and inner edges of the paper separated. The outer edge became a fold, and when I lifted the paper away from the spine, a map of my property appeared. Hand-drawn and not accurate to the current buildings, it looked like it had been rendered a century ago. Maybe more.

  My A-frame house occupied the same footprint as an earlier one, but the outbuildings were gone and sections labelled for livestock had succumbed to stands of blackberries, salal, and a smattering of native trees. I pictured egg-laying chickens hiding from the eagles and hawks that would have known exactly where their roosts were located.

  I refolded the map and eyed the next page. This one separated into two full pages that had numbered lists, much like a table of contents. One word and its accompanying icon leapt off the page.

  Portal.

  I took a closer look at the map, tried to keep my fingers from leaving prints on the page, and scanned for the word portal as well as its icon, a hand-drawn thin circle within a thick circle with the dot on one side, like a door handle.

  The spot occupied by my garden had not changed purpose or location. And the nearby tree could be the old crabapple. A portal icon nestled in its spidery branches.

  Figures.

  I hunted for more and found another portal icon straddling my property line and the road and yet another in the stand of fir trees at the back of property. When I flipped to the table of contents again, I read a series of sub-headings underneath the chapter titled Portals.

  How to Create a Portal. How to Travel Between Portals. Safety Tips for Portal Travel. Packing Tips for Portal Travel. What to do when you are stuck in a portal…cannot find your way out of a portal…encounter enemies inside the portal…are followed into the portal.

  How to Close a Portal. How to Destroy a Portal.

  Destroying a portal. Sounded like one of those magical things with consequences I didn’t want to consider.

  I took my athame to the third page then the fourth and the fifth, but I didn’t meet with the same success. No more pages opened to me, and rather than end up with ripped or otherwise destroyed or unreadable pages, I turned to the next book in line.

  An hour or so later, I had removed the outermost layer of each. Volumes one, two, four, and five were lined up on the floor in front of me. Each sported a burgundy leather cover decorated with gilt silver flourishes and my mother’s hand apparent in the embossed drawings. Volume three had nothing written on the front and was similarly blank on the inside. I touched my tongue to an inside page, half hoping my saliva would unveil the first of many secret words, but the page stayed blank.

  Volume three was the best candidate for my grimoire, but before I laid my claim, I would show it to Maritza.

  * * *

  Thirsty from my efforts, I filled a glass with water and lemon slices, drank it down, and set to my next task. Removing books and personal things out of my office required trip after trip. When it came time to move my desk—something I wished I had done first rather than last—I had to heft the desktop off the sawhorses and lean it against the door jamb. With the help of old towels to protect the floors, I dragged the heavy slab of wood across the hall. Once the desktop was back on the sawhorses, hunger drove me to the kitchen.

  A quick check of my phone showed I had texts from Thatcher and voicemail from Rose.

  “We took the ferry to VAN.”

  “Going to Ikea for furniture.”

  “Will be home around midnight. Love you.”

  Well, an evening to myself. And no Tanner in sight. The pang in my chest at being left alone was unexpected. I curled my fingers around the pouch I’d reclaimed and rehung around my neck, and contemplated my options. Eating was an obvious start.

  I set a plate on the counter and rifled through the refrigerator. Buffalo mozzarella cheese floated in a bowl of cloudy water next to half of a Black Krim heirloom tomato
. I pulled those out, dashed to my garden for a few basil leaves, and swore at the lack of bread when ransacked cupboards yielded only rice crackers. I stacked slices of cheese and tomato, added a basil leaf and a drizzle of balsamic vinegar, and ate my dinner standing by the sink. Made cleaning up all the easier.

  The slapdash meal filled my belly, but the hollow spots in my heart weren’t reacting well to the poke of jealousy’s pointy nails. I didn’t want to be that person who was quick to judge or anger, but I was riled up.

  Jack’s explanation about lures could explain some of Tanner’s behavior, not all. Viewed dispassionately, I could take what Wes said about the Tanner and the Apple Witch and their history and simply stay out of it. But she’d drawn me in deep by taking Abi and Cliff, and Tanner’d used his own kind of lure to keep me interested.

  I wasn’t desperate for another man in my life. In the short time I’d known Tanner Marechal a lot had happened—good, bad, strange, enlightening. I was willing to wait, and I was wary of comparing his actions to those of my ex.

  Slipping my washed and dried plate atop the stack, I returned to my bedroom.

  My desk fit nicely into the corner across from my bed. I plugged in my laptop, certain there would be communications from Kerry. I could spend tomorrow—Sunday—catching up.

  Sure enough, my work email box was full but not unwieldy. And nothing seemed urgent. My personal email was much sparser, especially now that I wasn’t active on any dating sites. Rose had sent two, the first labelled Lessons and the other, Directory of Witches. Before opening either, I listened to her message.

  “Calliope, this is Rose. I’ve emailed a lesson plan to you, along with a list of witches who are willing to personally share their expertise. Many of them are located on Vancouver Island or the greater Vancouver area. Please read through everything and have a look at the calendar. The Summer Module has six more sessions, all of which take place on Sundays. We do group lessons via the internet. The practicum takes place after. You’re getting a late start, but I believe you will catch up. Contact me if you have any questions.”